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Description
Flashcards by lauren.pritchard, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by lauren.pritchard
over 10 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Subject | It's written from the perspective of the wife of a soldier who has sustained serious injuries at war and has returned home. The poem explores the physical and mental effects of living with injuries sustained when on active service in the armed forces. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Structure | The poem is made up of a series of couplets, mostly not rhymed. This creates a sense of fragmentation, which matches the feelings of the soldier's wife as she seeks to understand the man her husband has become. The poem ends when the search is brought to a close. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Language | The title puns on the idea of the 'manhunt', meaning literally a hunt to capture a man, often a criminal. Here the wife's search is for the husband she knew so well but who seems lost to her, metaphorically, after his experiences at war. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Language | The speaker refers to parts of the husband's body metaphorically, comparing them to inanimate objects rather than to living things. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Language | There are lots of sensual, loving verbs in the poem, reflecting the intimacy of husband and wife, and keen devotion from the wife hoping to heal her husband. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Attitudes, themes and ideas | The Manhunt is about the patience and care of love. The wife in the poem is methodical and thorough in her search, exploring her husband's injured body with love and care. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Attitudes, themes and ideas | The poem also explores the cost of war on those serving in the armed forces. The man has a "grazed heart", perhaps literally from an injury caused by "the metal beneath his chest", but also metaphorically. He is unable to connect with his wife, unwilling to speak of his experiences, and so their loving relationship is affected. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Attitudes, themes and ideas | Lines 23 and 24 present the metaphor of "a sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind". The source of the problem is not physical but mental, and threatens to cause problems at any time. |
| Simon Armitage: The Manhunt Attitudes, themes and ideas | The poem is not about judging the rights and wrongs of war, but the impact of war on one particular relationship. This is made clear in the final line of the poem: "Then, and only then, did I come close". Her search is not fully successful, she only comes "close", and only after she realises that her husband's problems lie as much in memories of his experiences as they do in his physical scars. |
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